Not the scariest movie since THE EXORCIST...

Rating: 8/10 (16 August 2010)

...not even close. The only time I even flinched was when Jim set off the car alarm by accident! Still, 28 DAYS LATER is a very enjoyable horror movie. I don't know why they call it a "zombie" movie. There were no zombies. They weren't "undead"! The "monsters" depicted are people infected with a virus. A nasty one indeed, with rage and blood-red eyes and other yucky symptoms.
The playfully twisted personality of Danny Boyle is what really makes this horror film (not my favorite genre of course) work for me. I loved TRAINSPOTTING and SHALLOW GRAVE, and this film has those bits of dark humor throughout. Loved the grocery shopping scenes and the soundtrack.
The strong cast is another reason I enjoyed it. Each actor had a role for the viewer. I love Cillian Murphy (the soul whose confusion, fear and later, strength and resolve we all experience from the start of the film),Brendan Gleeson (the heart! more on that below) and Christopher Eccleston (the brain that ends up losing ability to reason), and I really enjoyed Naomie Harris (the brawn, relentlessly brutal when she's wielding that huge knife), who I hadn't seen before this film. The characters of a film to me are very important, and these characters, all their interactions and experiences, the family dynamic (Gleeson, in particular gives a beautiful performance as the father figure to the little cluster of survivors), make this one several cuts above the standard crappy horrors that are coming forth these days.
Took me a while to warm up to it, but it is actually quite the classic.